Glenn Sheller: Cooler heads needed in global-warming debate

Sunday

Sep 30, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 30, 2007 at 1:01 PM

Virtually from the start, the climate-change issue has been dominated by alarmists whose aim is to frighten us so much that we willingly demand higher taxes, limits on liberty and curbs on our standard of living to save ourselves from their visions of environmental apocalypse.

Virtually from the start, the climate-change issue has been dominated by alarmists whose aim is to frighten us so much that we willingly demand higher taxes, limits on liberty and curbs on our standard of living to save ourselves from their visions of environmental apocalypse.

But hysteria is not conducive to good policymaking, says Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who gained instant fame -- and in alarmist circles, infamy -- with the 2001 publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that subjected the alarmists to withering fact-checking and cost-benefit analysis.

The problem with The Skeptical Environmentalist is that it is thick enough to choke a hippo and packed with enough science and math to give Stephen Hawking a brain cramp. Now Lomborg has published a smaller, more accessible book called Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.

Armed with statistics and sweet reasonableness, he does two things. First, he surveys the science in every area affected by global warming and shows that in case after case, climate-change alarmists are telling only the negative half the story or extrapolating wildly improbable scenarios from modest trends.

For example, he says that while global warming causes an increase in heat deaths, it prevents four times as many deaths from cold, for a large net benefit in temperature-related mortality. Global warming will reduce rainfall in some parts of Africa, but it will increase rainfall in other parts of the continent, for a net increase in water well-being for Africans. Polar-bear populations are not being destroyed by global warming; in fact, the polar bear population has increased fivefold, to 25,000, since the 1960s. Sea levels are not going to rise by an apocalyptic 20 feet as alarmist-in-chief Al Gore prophesies, but more likely by 12 inches over the next century. And by the way, the world already has endured precisely such a sea-level increase since 1850. How many of us noticed?

Second, he asks a fundamental question: Given that global warming entails some harm, what is the most cost-effective way of countering it? His answer is that in virtually every area, there are ways to mitigate or reverse the harmful effects of global warming at a fraction of the cost demanded by the alarmists.

Their preferred method is the costly Kyoto treaty, which mandates a global reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions. But this effort results in negligible heat reduction over the next century, while imposing huge costs, not the least of which is the opportunity cost in reduced economic development, which will hit hardest in the Third World. A chart near the end of the book shows that conventional methods costing $52 billion a year can do far more to improve human health, safety and well-being than the $180 billion annual price tag of Kyoto.

One of his earliest observations was that the money it would take for the United States to comply with Kyoto is more than would be needed to supply every human on the planet with clean water and sanitation, saving 2 million lives a year.

But Lomborg doesn't suggest the world should do nothing about greenhouse gases. He simply asks that before we act, we do some arithmetic. If each additional ton of carbon dioxide is going to cause $2 of additional global-warming damage, which he considers a low but reasonable estimate, it makes no sense to impose a $140-a-ton carbon tax to prevent that damage, as Gore has proposed. To do so would be to throw away $138 a ton that could be used for conventional and cheaper methods to reduce disease, protect the environment and promote human and environmental welfare.

"When people spend $5 to offset a ton of CO{-2}, they do some good (probably providing about $2 worth of benefits to the world). But the same $5 donated to a different organization could have done $200 worth of social good if used for HIV/AIDS prevention or $150 worth of social good if used against malnutrition. I would like it to be cool to do $200 worth of good before $2," he writes.

His plea is for global-warming alarmists to stop shouting down and demonizing anyone who questions their predictions and prescriptions, so that reasonable people can debate the trade-offs in global-warming policy. The danger of allowing alarmists to call the shots is that we will waste resources on unnecessarily expensive fixes that result in more human misery, not less.

Glenn Sheller is editorial-page editor of The Dispatch.

gsheller@dispatch.com

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